On top of that I still only just got back from a week's vacation and only made it through about a thousand emails so far, along with getting the "unread" marker off most the PRs and issues updated since last. Still need to catch up with forum, Slack, other social media, and so on ...

To get a feeling for what is in this build vs. Alpha 5 check out the closed issues in the Alpha 6 milestone keeping in mind that'll really only be accurate for a day or two from this posting ...

As another new thing we should be able to try out @qwc's Docker-hosted server for the testing, that'll be the "Official Unstable" entry in the server list. Just connected to it with this build right now and it works fine, although I suspect the server might need a quick restart / server reset, feels sluggish and world age is somewhat old

Am hoping we can use this opportunity (in about 11 hours) for some testing to hunt down outstanding bugs. For instance some players using Alpha 5 have encountered disappearing item icons in inventories and even broken crafting somehow. Example video below (also has a few other useful player observations that are on us to improve) and another report from IRC just today. Not entirely sure if that was something we've fixed, but there are some other issues like how the create game screen is now too vertically crowded, with outright button/text overlap and difficulty changing world generator.

In other news!

GSOC 2016 Mentor Summit is over and was very cool to attend, although I really wish I could've had a second mentor along for the trip! It was neat to run into people there whose work you've seen, by total coincidence I ran into the author of the up-for-grabs.net we signed up for not too long ago. Hoping to get more of a write-up for this done soon along with some follow-ups

We signed up for Google Code-In which is like GSOC but way smaller for high school students out to complete tasks to get a t0 get a t-shirt and maybe more (including a paid trip to Google next summer)

New PR record set at twenty (20!) outstanding. I really do need some help and sandwiches sent! Some good stuff, review, and merging is happening but we need more!

I link, therefore I am. I tweet, therefore I work. Rainbow collector, undaunted optimist, organic search bot, and crazy idea guy. Will give serious thought to anything at least once. Do feel free to disagree and express productive counter views, in public or via convo, any time!